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22 Feb 2017

Transience is supposed to be a temporary, transitory stage, yet we shall see in this third and final part of my essay how it is being made to drag on so as to become a permanent fixture of modern society. Transience applies geographically and figuratively and relates to transition, waiting for a change to manifest one way or another.

Transience is a state of limbo that occurs somewhere between a departure point and a destination point when events are fluid and uncertain. It summons aimless errance, perhaps drifting, with an element of waiting for circumstances to change for the better. It is the state of not knowing what's next and not belonging anywhere in particular at a moment in time and for whatever reason this might be. There are no roots to transience, no anchorage. It is the free agent for change, hence for uncertainty and unpredictability. It belies a period of unstability.

I have identified herein five transience-generating areas within our modern society. The list is not exhaustive: -

* Paradigm Shifts:Our governments, in cahoot with the media and corporate elites, have upped the ante to engineer a generation or two of confused kids (a.k.a. snowflakes): dumbed-down propagandist education system, gender theory, reinterpretation of the family unit, weakening of Christianity, radicalised angst-ridden feminism, political correctness, forced multi-culturalism, the sharing economy, and other paragons of humanist (undertand socialist) ideology jar with traditional homogeneous family values in terms of tradition, culture and history. We witness societal confusion, a shift in points of reference, landmarks sliding away. What used to be held in stone, held as truth by our socio-political system has now been questioned, deemed untrue. Reciprocally what used to be considered a lie is now held as truth: a fluid set of rules!

Under European rule, Europeans are getting the feeling of not belonging anywhere anymore, not to their own country that they do not recognise as it is losing the characteristics that used to make it unique. Their national/ federal government is alien to its people and to the voice of discontent. Europeans do not feel allegiance to Europe either. They feel distrust towards this unelected body ruling unilaterally over a conglomerate of countries bundled up together due to our close geographical proximity. We are all under the ludicrously remote, faceless, authoritarian governship of Babel (I mean Brussels).

This forced Europeanism on its way to the larger picture of globalism is a representation of transience. It stunts our organic growth as individual countries and puts us in limbo.

* Depressed Economy:
When jobs have been forced out of our Western nations to the Far East en masse - as a result of our governments' over-regulation, corporate taxation and other economic burdens, companies have restructured and fierce competition has increased, the job market gets tougher and job security weaker. Lucky is being left with an entry-job for life (i.e. no or little scope for promotion and a career) and the general dead-end retail/ service jobs that keep you on minimum wage for the duration of your working life (white-collar poverty).

Employment opportunities are scarce across all age groups, including those over-qualified graduates. You live in fear of not finding a job, being unable to keep it, ending on the dole, failing to make ends meet and falling onto hard times. There is no self-sufficiency, no financial independence in the picture; loans, mortgages, debts chain you down further. When unemployed/ on low pay, the State takes care of you with little subsidy it provides, putting you in that shadow category, outside the world of workforce. Volatility in the workplace and the depressed economy translate a lack of durability; retail shops open and close fast. The retail institutions that have survived one generation are becoming a rare commodity.

Lack of self-sufficiency, no sense of belonging, constant fear and discomfort are by-products of transience.

* Planned Obsolescence:This good old trick that kicked in with Henry Ford in the 1920s is what keeps the production/ consumption machine oiled up to the hilt. It goes hand in hand with the fickleness of fashion and fast-moving trends that play right in the hand of disposability, and genuine technological progress whose pace has accelerated in recent years. Shorter lifespans and shelf lives, and little to no staying power... Even couture designers like ex-Dior's Raf Simons are burning out, complaining about the frenetic pace of the catwalk and fast turnover of fashion collections.

When you are on a constant move and feel you are playing catch up all the time, this unanchored, unsettled state is called transience.

* Transhumanist Agenda:Transhumanism is the science that correlates human and machine via AI (Artificial Intelligence). It demonstrates how technology is set to benefit us by increasing our mental, intellectual and physical performance with bionic aids, and in certain ways triggering our brain to think like a machine. Multi-lingual websites that are machine-translated subtly but surely show a facet of the transhumanist bias.

Transportation, media, telecommunications and information technology have transformed our lives beyond compare over the last 30 years. Meanwhile social media, a relatively new kid on the block, has already deeply changed our ways of communicating and interacting with others. Besides the treatment of information has taken on a strong transience bias. Instant messaging/ posting puts you right in the moment for the moment. The present has a very short, fleeting - even fickle - window of operation and lifespan. Through our technology-driven communications, we are bombarded with so much information that our attention span is continuously challenged and titillated by other facts to consume fast without time for a thought. We end up being present within a very short timeframe before being challenged and veered off a tangent again. Not forgetting the idiosyncracies of technological progress that keep us on our toes: constant updates and upgrades, forcing us to forever having to adapt to the latest version of an app or programme. This may be a given if you are a teen or young adult, less so for your parents and grandparents!

We are literally drowning in an-ever expanding sea of news, visual distraction and solid ambient noise. Information is fed through technology, at the mercy of it being tampered with, manipulated, updated, upgraded, unplugged. Transience is right at home there!

* Emperiled National Sovereignty: Open-border policy and its resulting engineered mass migration is the thorn in the side of the West right now. It acts as the wide-scale resettlement of an uncapped number of individuals (in their millions) allegedly fleeing war-torn, poverty-ridden countries (otherwise classified as emerging countries, Third World). They are essentially relocated to Western countries, which are economically richer, deemed politically stable, and with a welfare system in place.

Migration is a spur-of-the-moment, open-door policy that prides itself in being unchartered - and seemingly unregulated. The modern day migrants are mostly driven, angry young Muslim men, wearing fashion attire and technology-equipped. They land upon our shores with an erased past, a low IQ, high expectations and no expressed desire to integrate. No proof of ID required (which would technically have them qualified as illegals or refugees except they're not), and not a penny to their name. I shall add:-

When you erase someone's history, you undress them from the riches and depths of family, tradition, heritage, culture, self-worth, identity. You uproot them, cut the anchors. You isolate them from their true self. Someone without history is not free and grounded; they are transient in their body, mind and spirit, on a quest to find out their origins, their true selves. When you erase their history, you are left with a blank canvas. You may rewrite it for them, remould it as you see fit. This doesn't serve the individual, it serves the global agenda, which is all about short-term memory, superficiality, and transience.

This forced multi-culturalism of sorts that is being expedited under globalisation personifies transience in modern society. It shakes up by its very essence the host countries' fabric in terms of republican, secular and religious values, national identity, safety, homogeneity and unity to the core. Regardless of political affiliation, one must admit that migration in its current high numbers is not sustainable, and neither is this extended transience in itself. Meanwhile the natives feel invisible and unheard, as all sorts of eccentric, unreasonable demands are placed upon them by their increasingly undemocratic governments, in order to force them to surrender their nation to the global agenda that lies ahead, as the EU is increasing its governance over our lives - and we have no word in edgeways on the matter.

As for us indigenous populations of the West, we have to be/ remain mobile - transient - within our own countries, for work or
personal purposes and it could take most of our adulthood before we are finally able to settle down in one place. Rural exodus is not a trend of the past. After peaking through the Industrial Revolution and the 20th century, it is set to carry on depleting the countryside. As a direct consequence, cities are soaring, a trend that is encouraged under Agenda 21. This uprootedness is symptomatic of transience.

"Man without history, culture, nation, family and civilisation is not free: he is naked and condemned to despair." - French Canadian sociologist Mathieu Bock-Côté (translated from French)

P.S: Note the difference between migration and (legal) immigration. Legal immigrants move from their country of origin or residence to a new specific country where they settle down with their family. There is an immigration protocole for them to follow in order to become part of the local society: for example, visa, application for residence and Green Card if in America. On the other hand, migration is an open model of immigration without a roadmap or demand, uncommitted to responsibility, including that of integration, and who whimsically follows the pick-and-choose-a-country formula as it is presented to them. Migrants are the no-history, no-fixed-abode and no-fixed-destination travellers with the risks that such can bring: social misfits, drifters. Note the Houdini trick here: illegal immigration has been cleverly merged into migration. This legalises and legitimises illegals instantly and automatically (cf. Paradigm Shifts section).

P.P.S: Nomadic tribes are not technically classified as transient because their nomadism is a pillar of their society structure. They have a history, culture, way of life that revolves around travel, follows a specific habitual pattern, in relation to seasons, transhumance (seasonal migration of herds and humans from lowlands to the mountains), customs and traditions, availability of produce, and trade. Their nomadism is no aimless wander.

The steady unrelenting erosion of national sovereignty paves the way for globalism, a paragon of transience all to itself as its aim is to level down all countries to a pre-made model, where we will be formatted to think the same, speak the same, dress the same, live the same, behave the same and essentially be the same. This Orwellianism has become a feat of realism as it is already happening right before our very eyes. History is erased or constantly readjusted: yesterday's truth is today's lie.

17 Feb 2017

In Part 1 of this essay, we established that theoretically speaking whoever strives to defy time would be able to make a claim for immortality. Thus whoever claims to be immortal has transcended the timely restrictions imposed upon their life as a human. The notion of immortality takes us back to the catchy aliteration of the timeless timeline of Time. Timelessness evokes magnitude, amplitude, uninterrupted vastness in space and time. It expresses continuity, cohesion and stability.

Transience, on the other hand, sits precariously on the opposite end of the spectrum. Transience implies a notion of time that is fleeting, brief, truncated, interrupted, non-lasting, whimsical and ultimately unreliable and inefficient. This is about discontinuity. There is a sense of disturbance to it like an underwater current. Beware the underlying chaos!

Now referring to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the noun transience is defined as 'the quality or state of being transient.' Synonyms: Ephemerality, evanescence, impermanence, momentariness. Antonyms: Endurance, permanence.

The adjective transient is defined as 'passing especially quickly into and out of existence: transitory. [...] Passing through or by a place with only a brief stay or sojourn.'

Bearing in mind the immediate adversity imposed upon us by entropy and mortality, the human prerogative aims to make the most effective use of time within a competitive production model. For should it not to be the case, the process would ultimately lead to doom.

However it appears that our production model has redefined efficiency under a new paradigm. Efficiency used to involve durability under a long-lasting good or service. This as a mission statement had a vision to it, to serve not only the present but the future too. Transience does not and cannot sustain durability. It does not build upon an impetus, it interrupts it. A society whose production model is built upon transience is akin to a transient (casual) friendship that you cultivate with somebody: it does not grow roots or leaves, it does not evolve and deepen because there is no commitment to it, no fire, no bond, no guarantee. It is a stunted affair that remains so until the transient element is corrected.

The
faceless banking corporations and multinationals that govern us have cleverly refashioned efficiency since the industrial heyday - and have accelerated its process with the coming of age of mass-consumerism. We mostly have one person to thank for this, Public Relations spin doctor and business insider Edward Bernays - Simon Freud's nephew - and a top influencer in the world of advertising and consumer psychology. He used consumer profiling to serve private interests, using strong-arm tactics to influence purchasing decision. He is indeed the father of customer trickery.

Bernays was also a trendsetter who wrapped both corporations and consumers tightly around his little finger. He for instance encouraged women to take up smoking by glamourising the cigarette in post-WWI New York City by way of savvy advertising campaigns that centered around personal gratification and desire, concepts that still ring true to this day in advertising. He also engineered water fluoridation PR campaigns to get public trust. Apart from getting us into bad habits, Bernays also wrote a few influential books, including Propaganda, a PR treatise whose most fervent reader was Joseph Goebbels, that's right, Hitler's henchman and future Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Germany's Third Reich.

When efficiency used to be defined by the clever use of time in order to accomplish a task and deliver a good or service via a process that would bring a lasting effect in terms of quality (to stand the test of time according to our human proclivities), this is no longer applicable. In the third and final part of this essay, we will see how vested interests have corrupted the production model under a socio-political ideology in order to reframe and rephrase efficiency, with transience at the core. I will describe the areas which I have identified as being of a transient nature, under the remodelled paradigm of efficiency. (to be continued)

14 Feb 2017

In order to discuss transience, we need to start off with the unadulterated notion of Time. If we were to represent its timeline, it would be intrinsically timeless, infinite: imagine a continuous ribbon, i.e. with no beginning and no end. This itself is not easy to figure out as a human being. Our lives are brief (compared to the estimated age of planet Earth), and our biological clock takes us to sleep one third of every day, and in the remaining two thirds we cram activities that are structured around our lifestages and other rites of passage (the different echelons of education, household, work, leisure, travel, socialising, etc). To say that we humans are time-constrained by our frame of reference in relation to time itself is almost an understatement!

Meanwhile the same notion of infinity that applies to time also applies to space above and beyond the solar system, with no beginning and no end either. The notion of infinite is baffling for us mere mortals, it is a dimension all to itself that we cannot apply in our lives because we are by essence finite (at least in our body form).

Now as a human, when you hold a vision for yourself and the world, you need to take into account two fundamentally nonmutable parameters that make you stand right against the test of time: (a) the natural entropy (decay, degenerescence, obsolescence) of inanimate objects and the all-encompassing natural environment, and (b) the mortality of living beings, which occurs as the end point of entropy, the latter manifesting itself through ageing process, health problems, accidents, war and conflicts, etc.

If there is one certainty to expect - and accept - from life it is that, no matter what, we will one day cease to exist (at least in this dimension, under the current set-up). Death is not a probability, it is a certainty, a fact of life, a circumstantial expectancy. Even the wealthiest, healthiest, happiest, kindest person on earth will one day die. Pharaohs understood it, which is why they were very keen on prolonging human life into the afterlife, in order to bridge the finality expressed by death and bring on the idea of immortality to the defunct. More broadly, religion is here to help us accept the end of life and open to the probability of redemption and reincarnation. Because the notion of death as the all-consuming be-all and end-all, anticlimactic grand finale, is perceived by most of us as the ultimate human tragedy, we must therefore believe in the possibility of a follow-up, a continuity of sorts.

Transcending mortality in spirit in order to live on in death is one thing, but you can transcend mortality in more prosaic ways, through transmission; passing on a legacy, heritage to be inherited by your next of kin, local community or to civilisation as a whole (values, skillsets, discoveries, physical assets, material goods, hard cash). Leaving a trace on earth as you pass on is not only an act of philanthropy, it is almost certainly a survival skill, a tangible proof of life ('Hey, I was here, look what I accomplished!'), however discrete. It might sound egotistical, yet essentially this is what we all do, whether consciously or not. Depending upon the individual and the circumstances, leaving something behind (as legacy, heritage) may not necessarily be positive and beneficial. Rather it may be morally and/ or physically nefarious: calomny, debt, detritus, a trail of death and destruction... Think about what Nero or Hitler left behind.

Man standing the test of time in order to defy it has held true from the opening chapter to the History of Civilisation. From those early days on, the visionaries and luminaries of society in their widest scope have made it their goal to channel philosophical ideas, produce material goods and execute architectural constructions that would as beacons of grace and progress collectively advance the human condition and bring progress to society - and have a lasting effect. Think the greats of this world and their accomplishments: The Founding Fathers of America's Constitution, Napoleon's Civil Law Code, Nikola Tesla, Gustave Eiffel, Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, etc. They materialised a vision for the better good for the now and most importantly for generations to come: legislation, a code of conduct, scientific discoveries. It was part of the organic, natural altruistic evolution of man: to labour for the betterment of oneself and others. Of course this carries on into the present but in Part 2 we shall find out how transience was introduced into our business, production and political model in order to thwart progress, and at the same time unhinge the present into a permanent fixture.

Ideas transcend time. The notion of immortality - or rather the defiance of time within its human constraints - is realised through art, sciences (inventions), applied to objects and constructions that bring a mechanical and/ or aesthetic (beautification) momentum and purpose into our lives and those of generations to come, erecting towers that take us closer to the Heavens and Wisdom. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are one example of the socio-cultural legacy that has perdured to this day, if only as accounts (feeding the stuff of myths and legends) or as scattered archeological fragments for most of them - bar for the otherworldly Great Pyramid of Giza, still standing in its time-defying, mystical, enigmatical grace. (to be continued)

11 Feb 2017

In light of political events currently unfolding in the West, there is no more à propos video than the one I am sharing here right now, and which I describe as The Gumball Theory. Let's stay smart here: I invite you to watch it with an open mind and from start to finish (it only takes 6 minutes!) before casting judgement. From the outset, if viewing numbers are to go by, the video's 4 million views since its release in September 2010, proves this is a hot topic!

Please do pay attention to the rationale and follow the logical process put forward by NumbersUSA founder, author and lecturer Roy Beck, through his ingenious and creative illustration of why full-scale, deregulated, open-door immigration (regardless of faith and ideology), promulgated on the basis of humanitarianism does not serve the humanitarian purpose. Put simply, it does not work for either the welcoming state or the state of origin. In fact none of the socio-economic problems (poverty, unemployment) at either end are solved, and no benefits are gained, contrary to what is being purported by the progressist (i.e. liberal) agenda.

As a light-hearted note, you will never look at (or chew!) gumballs the same way after this!P.S:NumbersUSA is an Education & Research Foundation, founded by Roy Beck and an advocate of lower immigration levels. It works in partnership with Moderates, Conservatives and Liberals. NumbersUSA describes itself as "a non-profit,
non-partisan organization that favors an environmentally sustainable and economically just America and seeks to educate the public about the effects of high levels of immigration on U.S. overpopulation, the environment, jobs, and wages. We use government data to conduct research on the impacts of U.S. population growth, consumption, sprawl, and current levels of immigration and educate the public, opinion leaders and policy makers on the results of those and other studies."

P.P.S: Read the full PDF version (362 pages) of Roy Beck's acclaimed book, The Case Against Immigration, The moral, economic, social and environmental reasons for reducing U.S. immigration back to traditional levels, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1996.

5 Feb 2017

If I somehow managed to convince you to fall in love with handwriting all over again, well done! Handwritten notes and letters needn't be fancy or pricey, as long as your heart is in the right place. Start off with whatever pad or notecards you have handy (this might involve a little treasure hunt down the depths of your drawers and boxes). However should you seek a little style in the form of office covet, read on.

Although you might find your happiness down the Staples aisle - and there is nothing wrong with that - more often than not the interesting stationery pieces happen to be located off the mainstream retail track. Here are some right little gems to get you started and lend a spring to your creative step. If vintage is your thing, you're in for a treat: we've got it covered as far back as the late 17th century!

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